Not too impressed with Ann. She was in the moderate camp from the beginning. Her schtick is bashing Democrats. We know that many in the GOP Establishment are anti-Newt. Judging from how that Establishment was with 8 years of Bush, I'm not much enamored with them.
Newt is establishment as well. It's hard to get more established than him. Hell, his political label is also fluid. He can appeal to the moderates with what he deemed "Progressive Conservatism" several years ago*, and he can appeal to self-appointed "real conservatives" by pointing to the Ronald Reagan icon as well as the Speakership. Why that seems particularly damaging, I understand, but do not agree. I prefer my Washington insiders, I like the establishment, and I can enjoy fluidity. For your information, Newt was also helpful for the Bush administration in providing at least one name to help develop the war plan for the Iraq war (particularly its emphasis on substantially small troop numbers in comparison with other proposals). He was good at providing other GOP leaders people that they would be interested in and selling the ideas. Whether or not this is in your nexus for establishment, but many of the names in the previous administration were also at AEI (including the Vice President), which Newt was more or less loosely a scholar for.
*From Think-Tank, "What's a Neocon?"
-Ben Wattenberg: "Neoconservatism -- I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the word has become poisonous to a point that it’s unusable now.
The ideas make sense and, Newt, I’ve been reading your stuff--I’ve been reading your stuff -- you call yourself a progressive conservative. Is that right?
Gingrich: That's a term you could use.
Wattenberg: What is the difference between a progressive conservative and a neoconservative?
Gingrich: Look, my bias, having grown up and deeply influenced, for example, by Irving Kristol’s articles in 1976 on the Stupid Party and The Future of the Republican Party, which were both in the Wall Street Journal -- they were remarkably accurate insights into the problems of the Republican Party.
In my mind, neoconservatives were people who started their lives as liberal Democrats, even to the left of liberal. But who over a period of time largely driven by communism became more and more militant about defending America and about adopting policies that they thought would work in the real world.
And, so, you have a whole generation of people from Irving Kristol to Jeane Kirkpatrick, to Bill Bennett, who found themselves no longer capable of being in the Democratic Party as it was evolving.
Many of them were Scoop Jackson Democrats and many of them came out of sort of a socially liberal, fiscally practical and national security hard line background that was very different than the old Republican Party.
[...]
Gingrich: Let me go back to where I think the neoconservatives I think evolved.
One wing of evolution as in a sense Edward Banfield at Harvard and a whole range of people who said, when you look analytically at the data -- that there were a series of social policies and domestic economic policies, in some ways starting with urban renewal, that were not working.
They were actually making life harder for the poor.
[...]And I would argue in that sense neoconservatism’s great contributions which were -- which -- in welfare reform and to some limited extent in other domestic policy and then in the defeat of the Soviet empire were extraordinarily historic.